Seeds of Sorrow Reviewed By Karen Dahood of Bookpleasures.com

Karen Dahood

Reviewer Karen Dahood :
Karen lives in Tucson, AZ. After 35 years as a writer for businesses
and nonprofits, she has turned to writing mysteries,the subtext of
which addresses ageism, unpreparedness for aging, and America's
wealth of experience and wisdom. Learn more about eldersleuth Sophie
George at the Website Moxie
Cosmos; Making Sense of Life Through Writing.

Following THE PORTER’S
WIFE, the inspiring story of a young English widow who, in 1904,
migrates to Canada with five young children, SEEDS OF SORROW
re-introduces the three girls as adults facing their own challenges
in Winnipeg and Vancouver in the 1920s. Like its predecessor, this
novel requires that a reader settle in slowly and attentively to
carefully planted detail, to not expect tricks of plot, but to trust
and appreciate the viewpoints of characters based on Lisa Brown’s
ancestors as they experienced the frontier. Bad weather, lack of
infrastructure, and a fledgling business economy provide the grim
backdrop for this absorbing family history drama.

Margaret, Agnes and Mary
are the siblings who remain geographically and emotionally close when
they marry and start families. Margaret and her husband John have a
restaurant in Winnipeg where Sarah, their seamstress mother, and Sam,
a grocer, have made secure lives. A downturn in the economy
persuades the young couple to move to the boom town of Vancouver;
Agnes and shell-shocked Art, and newlyweds Mary and Percy decide to
go with them, leaving the parents and brothers behind. This decision
is wrenching, but the excitement of new scenery and promise of a
fresh start propel them across the continent to the rising port city
on the Pacific coast.

While the dialogue is
slow-paced at times, it places us accurately in a time when married
couples dominated society, and when milestones were not moon landings
seen on TV, but family births and deaths, and seeing mountains for
the first time. Scenes that depict characters navigating infant
cityscapes; sharing home-cooked meals, serving fashionable gin
martinis; training parakeets, and gawking at natural wonders, would
evoke nostalgia were it not for the undertow of sadness accompanying
those hard times.

Had SEEDS OF SORROW been
written a century ago as a contemporary novel, it might now be taught
in college literature classes as an example of American Realism along
with Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy,
Stephen Crane’s Maggie: a Girl of the Streets, Frank Norris’s The
Octopus; A California Story, and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
A major difference between those social critics and Brown is that
Brown has sufficient emotional intelligence and presumably the facts
to make the reader embrace this family and not just tut-tut over the
vagaries of Nature, banking, and stocks, of which little needs be
said to get across the point. These 20th century pioneers demonstrate
their love and keep faith in God’s plan even as their dreams fade.

The
writer’s sensibilities come from a time of civility, optimism, and
cooperation. Her effect is to persuade us to admire how this family
sticks together to survive, bravely “sweeping feelings and emotions
under the rug.” There is more to come, and we expect some triumphs
over adversity. Indeed, the very first chapter in this book opens
hopefully, if teasingly, with a third generation wedding day in 1944
-- before chapter two takes us back to the uncertainty of 1919.